Very young children successfully acquire the vocabulary of their nativ
e language despite their limited information processing abilities. One
partial explanation for children's success at the inductive problem w
ord learning presents is that children are constrained in the kinds of
hypotheses they consider as potential meanings of novel words. Three
such constraints are discussed: (1) the whole-object assumption which
leads children to infer that terms refer to objects as a whole rather
than to their parts, substance, color, or other properties; (2) the ta
xonomic assumption which leads children to extend words to objects or
entities of like kind, and (3) the mutual exclusivity assumption which
leads children to avoid two labels for the same object. Recent eviden
ce is reviewed suggesting that all three constraints are available to
babies by the time of the naming explosion. Given the importance of wo
rd learning, children might be expected to recruit whatever sources of
information they can to narrow down a word's meaning, including infor
mation provided by grammatical form class and the pragmatics of the si
tuation. Word-learning constraints interact with these other sources o
f information but are also argued to be an especially useful source of
information for children who have not yet mastered grammatical form c
lass in that constraints should function as an entering wedge into lan
guage acquisition.